How Long Has This Been Going On (15 page)

"Who'll hold the camera? No one knows about us. We're history's secret."

"Todd."

"Huh?"

"Todd'll hold the camera. He has a Polaroid. You know, where you pull it out after you snap? He has me shoot him from time to time, so he can check his progress with the weights. Frank."

"What?"

"I'm so lucky. Even if I am a slob and I can't hold down a job, at least a guy as fine as you likes me."

"No, Larken," says Frank, looking straight at him. "I love you." Frank is terrified of those words, but he believes he means them, and the history meter just clicked on.

Y
OU KNOW WHAT'S wrong with Homicide? You know why Homicide's not that much better than Vice? You know what's probably wrong with the whole fucking department?

The
cops
are what's wrong! Jesus, the fucking assholes they give you for partners! Frank was actually starting to miss Jack Cleery. It's crazy how you can get on more or less okay with a guy but then he'll maybe use a word here or there that you can't stand hearing. You can't ask him not to, because he'll ask you why the fuck he shouldn't. What are you supposed to say then? Especially since they're such common words. Like "cocksucker." And "faggot." And "queer." One guy came up with a new one, "fairy doodles." As in "That's one real fairy doodles crossing the street in the sandals, see, right there?" I mea
n, fairy doodles?

Frank's getting sensitive, okay. But it's this enveloping thing. For instance, he doesn't even like the word "nigger" any more. He used to use it, thought nothing of it. It's not derogatory; it's descriptive. White, French, Methodist, nigger: words that tell who you are. Suddenly, Frank hears the meanness in one of those words. He walks into the cop shop, first day on Homicide, lasts two hours with his first partner and the rest of the week with his second partner, runs through four more partners in the next three months, cruises alone for a while, then hooks up with a guy who seems okay because, right at the top, he tells Frank he doesn't like "racial slurs." Turns out the guy is part Indian, though he doesn't look it, and his name's O'Brien. O'Brien works out fine for four days. On the afternoon of the fifth, they're taking a Code Seven at the donut place on North Vermont, and O'Brien cranks down the last of his coffee, blissfully belches, and says, "You hear the one about the shitpacking faggot and the lurid lisping lesbian?"

Frank finally landed with John Luke, a Chinese American who was as uncomfortable with generic tags as Frank was. John overused the term "M.O."—for
modus operandi,
"method of procedure," meaning everything from a crook's habits to the speediest way to open a bottle of beer when you can't find the church key. All right, every cop overused it. But with John it was chronic, almost moment to moment. Still, better "M.O." times without number than "cocksucker" anytime.

What a stupid notion, anyway—sucking cock. Frank was a full-fledged gay man now, even if he couldn't stand Thriller Jill's and was utterly mystified when Larken told him that Judy was "a high priestess of the cult." (First, Frank didn't know whom "Judy" referred to; second, he said, "What cult? And why not Joanne Dru?") Still, no one can make rules for you to be what you are. You make your own rules; and, by Frank's rules, Frank was gay. Yet he had never as much as lapped at Larken's cock and had no intention of trying to. Larken was a devotee of sucking, and that was okay, because getting blown is just about the easiest
satisfying
thing to do sexually, all men will agree. And if Larken enjoys it, well... fine. But to call all gay men "cocksuckers" is to...

Aw, fuck it.

Oh, but you know what's funny? Coming into this world of Larken's, you really do start to see things differently.

Like your parents. It's almost as if you were an actor in a play, and one night you go on and, without warning, all the other characters are spouting lines from some other script. You
know
these people—I mean, the guy's your father, right? Yet he's coming off as a stranger.

Look, it's the same room, the same bed, the same father coming in to talk nights. And I feel the same way about him, don't I?, and I very clearly feel the burden he's carrying. Yet suddenly I don't think he can hear what I'm saying. It's the wrong script for what he knows.

Like this trouble I had settling on a partner. I tell him about these guys and the stupid things they say, and he just looks at me.

"It's no big deal, Frank," he goes.

"It is to me."

"They're good guys, are they not? Stand-up guys, sticking by you?"

"I... Sure, but—"

"That's what matters. The rest is words. Words is nothing, Frank. You keep your eye on the main things—how a man carries himself. Is he
righteous?
That's what to know."

"Words do matter, Dad. Words are the... the proof of what we're thinking. If a guy uses crummy words to knock everyone else down, what does that tell you about how he thinks about people? How's he supposed to protect them when he can only think of them as dagos and yids and bitches?"

"Don't use that word."

"Huh? What word?"

"'Bitches.' With your mother in the house and all...."

"The other words are
all right?"

Frank's father gave his son a good hard look. "Frank," he said, "just what in hell are you getting so beefed over?"

See, he can't hear what I'm saying. Maybe I should bring Larken over to explain the world to him.

Or John Luke. Frank's new partner was one sharp talker. An analyst. You give him a situation,
he figures
it, right? Any situation at all.

Like this: John's driving. There's this three-or four-minute pause. And John suddenly says, "We think of ourselves as law and order. You know, that's why we got into this. We're going to be so good for the world. But where do they get us from, anyway? We're mostly from the working classes—the most stubbornly intolerant and suspicious group in the job pool, if I may say."

"So what does that mean?" asks Frank.

"It means that the legislative entities don't really have to pass laws limiting the freedom of troublesome people, because the police will suppress them informally. Paralegally."

John has a nice voice, too. A coaxing voice.

"'Legislative entities'?" Frank echoes. "You go to college, John?"

Blushing, John says, "I do a little reading."

"Legislative entities, right."

"Just think about it, Frank. The way we treat the non-groups..."

"What are the—"

"Negroes. The poor. Unclaimed women. Foreigners. Homosexu—"

"What unclaimed women?"

"Single women, Frank. Women unprotected. You ever take in a rape report?"

"No."

"I'd like to think you'd be a lot more sympathetic than most of our blue brothers. A cop taking a rape complaint is not unlike a rabbit taking a complaint from a carrot."

"I don't get that."

"What does the rabbit want, Frank? He wants to eat the carrot, doesn't he?"

Frank grunted; but he was impressed enough to adopt John Luke's ideas and to pass them off as his own in conversation with Larken, and with his father, and even with Todd, who had taken to dropping in so often lately that Frank was starting to regard Todd as Frank's "other" gay friend.

Larken said that the idea of the police recruiting from the least tolerant social class was a historically significant perception that would have to be raised at the next Meeting, and he loved that line about the carrot, and he was proud of Frank to have come up with it, and he hugged Frank, and he suddenly seemed so happy that he almost wept.

"Yeah," Frank said, babbling out of embarrassment. "Yeah, he would be inclined to eat the carrot right up there."

Frank's father said that no Good Woman could be raped. Had Frank no respect for his dying mother?

Todd said that Frank was really nifty-looking, and he should consider what a solid gym program could offer a guy like him.

John Luke would erupt with these analyses without provocation—not in a cop bar after work, when law officers typically waxed philosophical, nor even in the middle of a Code Seven, when a recent encounter with some piece of human garbage would lead to a wry look at the way of the world, but while the two partners were riding in the unit. They could be resting, cruising, or even responding to a call, John breathlessly pouring out his views as they screeched around corners in pursuit of a crook.

"You notice about parents," John said, "that they keep saying they only want you to be happy, when what they
mean
is that
you
have to make
them
happy."

"Shouldn't you?" answered Frank. "After all they've done?"

"What if they don't like the girl you picked out?" said John, smiling at the wheel. He was all ready for this. Oh, was he ready. "What if they want you to be a doctor and you want to be a cop? Who gets to be happy, you or them?"

They had made a coffee-and-donut shop, sipping and dunking in the black-and-white, eyes roving the street for Signs of Something.

"See," John went on with his wry smile, "my parents are really more Chinese than American, so they make no pretenses about wanting me to be happy. They want me to be obedient. That's the M.O., see? Now, they don't like the girl I'm going to marry, and they always wanted me to be a doctor. But it's not that I haven't chosen wisely in love and work.... What's so funny over there?"

"Just the way you put it," said Frank. "'Love and work.'"

John shrugged. "They're the two main things in life, no? You get a 95 or the like on those two tests, you've made it, Frank, old sport."

"That's a good thing to know. Love and work, right."

"So, anyway, my parents tell me the girl is wrong for me and doctor is better than cop. But you know what it really is? Carol doesn't make kowtow to them, and they want
my
career to reflect
their
ambitions. Ha! I'm more American than Chinese, so I said, Nuts to them."

It had been four months since Frank and John had partnered up, and Frank liked John enough to count him as a friend. True, Frank couldn't relax with him and speak freely, as he could with Larken, or even with Todd. But John was another intelligent human being to communicate with, and there aren't that many of those. Good sense of humor, too. A sensible, fair, direct kind of guy.

"My parents never tried to tell me what to do," said Frank, not realizing—it's a common error—that his father had been directing him from birth. "But I'm not as solid with them as I used to be. I don't know. I'm... growing away, or something."

Frank's mother's condition had deteriorated so rapidly in the last few weeks that it was she who was growing—dwindling—away. Consequently, Frank's father was becoming harder and harder to reach, as if he had to turn himself to stone in order to weather it.

"Growing away," said John, like a teacher, or a mayor, as if he were announcing the next topic. "Yes," said John—which was so odd to Frank, because every other cop in the world said "Yeah." "It can happen in three ways, I've noticed," John continued. "You grow apart at about fifteen and never reconnect with them, or you just start to notice that they're this whole other generation with a whole different way of looking at the world. That would happen in your twenties.
Or
you become so fed up with them at thirty-five or so that you—"

"Whoa, I couldn't do that. Your parents are... well, like sacred beings who—"

"They're just people, Frank," said John, smiling his quiet smile; and his eyes do something, too, something friendly and at ease. "Sure, you're related to them by a cry of blood, as some Chinese put it. But you didn't marry them. You have a free choice about it. You can walk out of anything, Frank. Anything at all. A romance. A job. A family, if you have to."

There were times, in these discussions, when Frank felt that he could tell John that he was gay and John would have said no more than "Good for you." Frank would get shuddery at these moments, teasing himself with the possibility yet knowing he must never do it. Never.

Yet Frank very nearly... came out (Larken and that stupid image of a closet!) to his father a week or so later. Frank suppressed the urge as soon as he felt it, but he was shaken all the same. Where does an urge like that even come from? Christ, why do I have to
tell
someone I'm gay? Why can't I just
be
gay?

It's like there's this...
thing
in you, stirring and trying to get out. You
can feel
it.

Frank felt it so palpably that it was as if the word "gay" were rising inside him at the very sight of his father; and just as it hit air, Frank changed it to "I don't want to be a cop any more, Dad."

His father, boiling the water for Frank's mother's evening cup of tea, went on wiping the goo off the honey jar, then finally said, "Yeah, Frank. Yeah."

"No, Dad, I mean it. It just doesn't—"

"It's
not
the
time,
Frank," his father growled, so sharply that Frank instinctively grabbed him: to soothe, help, reassure. Frank's father turned away, almost shaking his son off.